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she had to sit on it all day. She pointed out that even the rickety chair
was wired together.

Down the road from the school, men and women loitered in the sun be-
fore the doors of their quarters talking and laughing. Other women were
bent busily over wash tubs, while their men sat nearby or cleaned and
trimmed lawns. One man burned dead grass off a small plot in preparation
to making a garden. The sound of chattering tongues filled the air. One
woman who bent over her wash tub gossiped with a neighbor on a front porch
across the road: "When my husband come in this mawnin he had changed his
color." This brough hoots of laughter. He was sitting by her side when
she called to her friend, and I noticed that his complexion was as dark
as it had ever been. Later I discovered that the men had been called out
the night before to stand in water as they mended a 12 inch water line, a
possible reason for his color condition.

Then the woman across the road looked up, placed her hands on her
hip and yelled: "Child my back is so stiff from pickin dem strawberries.
If I could catch Polly (meaning the bolita) I wouldn't pick another berry."
This brought more laughter. Then I heard the washer-woman exclaim: "Great
Lawd! I thought I was washin a table cloth. Bless goodness, if dis here
woman ain't gone and tuk a table cloth and made a dress out of it." This
brought the other women clustering about, including her friend from across
the way. Exclamations were made and opinions passed concerning the idea
and color of the dress in question. Then I heard the woman who was wash-
ing say: "My husband better not buy me no table cloth, or I'se gwine to
do that same trick. Dis here white woman has gone and larn me somethin."

Further along the road I observed several men around a Model-A Ford,

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